In Praise of Fluffy Bunnies
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In Praise of Fluffy Bunnies Copyright © 2012, Richard Forsyth. Background Reading John Lanchester's Whoops!, an entertaining account of how highly paid hotshot traders in a number of prestigious financial institutions brought the world to the brink of economic collapse, I was struck by the following sentence: "In an ideal world, one populated by vegetarians, Esperanto speakers and fluffy bunny wabbits, derivatives would be used for one thing only: reducing levels of risk." (Lanchester, 2010: 37). What struck me about this throwaway remark, apart from the obvious implication that derivatives were actually used to magnify risk rather than reducing it (doubtless by carnivores ignorant of Esperanto), was its presumption that right-thinking readers would take it for granted that Esperanto symbolizes well-meaning futility -- thus highlighting the author's status as a tough-minded realist. This is just one illustration that disdain for Esperanto in particular, and auxiliary languages in general, pervades intellectual circles in Britain today, as in many other countries. And if you dare to raise the subject of constructed international languages with a professional translator or interpreter be prepared not just for disdain but outright hostility. Of course professional interpreters are among the most linguistically gifted people on the planet, and can't see why the rest of us shouldn't become fluent in half a dozen natural languages in our spare time. (Not to mention the fact that a widespread adoption of Esperanto, or one of its competitors, would have a seriously negative impact on their opportunities for gainful employment.) Thus Esperanto has become a symbol of lost causes, to be dismissed out of hand by practical folk. Yet those risk-junkies busily trading complex derivatives who brought us to the brink of ruin also thought of themselves as supremely practical hard-headed folk. It turned out that they were in the grip of a collective delusion whose effects have impoverished us all. Perhaps they have something to learn from vegetarians and Esperanto speakers. In the world of supposedly practical folk today, during an intercontinental recession, the European Union spends vast sums of money each year on translating thousands of tonnes of documents into 23 different official languages. The demand for simultaneous interpreters in Brussels, Luxembourg, Strasbourg and at the UN consistently outstrips supply. Meanwhile in the UK, cohort after cohort of schoolchildren emerge from secondary education unable to understand any language other than their own, often after years of instruction in French, German or Spanish. "Never mind," retort the anglophone triumphalists, "English is the international language these days." If you really believe that English is an adequate lingua franca for Europe, let alone the world, try working in a multi-national research project. I spent 2 years as the only native English speaker in an EU project, with English as its official working language, and have been scarred by the experience. At first glance, this would seem to represent a triumph for the language of Shakespeare and Churchill: our native tongue has conquered the world! Sitting in a meeting, listening to colleagues conversing in Euro-globish heavily laden with mispronounced English jargon, trying to understand and make one's self understood, one starts to realize that this is not the triumph of English after all. It seems more like a devious kind of linguistic ju-jitsu, in which the world takes its revenge for being forced to accommodate monoglot English-speakers by twisting their language into a barbarous dialect which they find awkward and unfamiliar. Admittedly, English began as a creole, the offspring of a shotgun marriage between Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, but it has come a long way since then, and I personally am very fond of it. The anglicized pidgin that passes for English as an international language isn't the language I love, and it isn't a very effective medium of international communication either. As it happens, the most eloquent exponent of English as a means of communication that I have ever heard was a Hungarian. But most of us have neither the talent nor the dedication to reach such a height in our mother tongue, still less in a foreign language. We do, however, have sufficient ability to achieve communicative competence in Esperanto within three months; and when we employ it we'll be communicating with others in the same position as ourselves, i.e. second-language users. There won't be the fertile soil for misunderstanding that exists when a native speaker instinctively exploits the quirks of the language or a nonnative speaker makes a small slip of syntax with serious consequences. Why then does Esperanto remain a fringe cult? Why doesn't the EU insist that all children in Europe spend even a single term learning Esperanto? Part of the answer must be that, once you accept the idea of a constructed language, there is always the seductive possibility of doing better. At certain points during a course on Esperanto you will come across a construction (such as using the so-called accusative after a preposition to indicate motion) that makes you ask: why did Zamenhof do it that way -- surely that wasn't a good idea? If I want to learn Chinese, I may be daunted by the tonal system, or the thousands of unfamiliar characters, but I have to accept them: that's the way it is. But with an artificial language I'm tempted to think "that should be changed" whenever I come across a difficult or unappealing aspect. Esperanto was in several respects superior to Volapuk, and the Idists think than Ido is better is many respects than Esperanto. Not everyone agrees. Jespersen -- no mere dabbler, he -- believed that Novial was better than either. So it goes on. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of artificial languages have been proposed in the past couple of centuries. Most never get used in action. In fact, the second most widely used artificial language, after Esperanto, is probably Klingon, which was deliberately designed to sound harsh and be hard to learn! Only Esperanto, for all its perceived imperfections, has ever sustained a community of users numbering more than a few thousand for more than a few decades. Other international language projects, apparently more elegant in concept (e.g. Interglossa, Lingua Franca Nova), have remained on the drawing board. A list of those that have attracted at least some serious attention is given in the Appendix to this essay. Thus, early in the 21st century, we arrive at a situation where Esperanto stands as a proof of concept, but has failed to take off. In spelling it approaches the ideal of one character for one phoneme more closely than almost any natural language, consequently it is easy to pronounce from the page. Its grammar is far more regular than that of most natural languages, consequently it can be mastered in a month. Its vocabulary contains a large number of roots found in the major European languages, consequently it doesn't impose a forbidding memory load on adult learners -- provided that their first language is Indo-European. Above all, it has demonstrated repeatedly that international meetings can proceed smoothly without banks of interpreters sitting in cubicles and wires leading into everyone's ears. Nevertheless it is generally viewed as merely a hobby for cranks. Linguists sneer at it. EU policy-makers would rather pour rivers of taxpayers' money into translation agencies and an endless stream of machine-translation projects that never quite achieve their desired objectives than attempt to introduce Esperanto into the workings of the EU. Personally, I believe this situation is highly unsatisfactory. I am motivated to attempt to do something about it for two primary reasons: 1. In today's globalized civilization, the need for a common international medium of communication is more urgent than ever before; 2. The strain placed on English in its role as de facto international language is turning it into a monstrosity. Therefore I intend part of my website to play host to yet another effort to devise a constructed auxiliary language for international communication. I plan to kick off the process and with luck enlist some support. Why should such a quixotic enterprise succeed, when hundreds before it have failed? Well, it might not; but there is one advantage that neither Zamenhof nor any of the early pioneers enjoyed, and which none of the more recent interlinguists seem to have exploited -- the computer. Take my Word for it! An international language needs (1) a simple orthography, (2) a regular grammar, and (3) an easily learned vocabulary. Typical interlanguage projects tend to emphasize the first two points but leave the third in the background. Yet choice of lexical units is the most important of the three. It is normal for proponents of an auxiliary language to claim that its vocabulary is 'international' in some sense but the foundation for this claim is almost invariably subjective. Zamenhof's approach to Esperanto vocabulary-building can be described as 'eclectic'. It has been said that Esperanto sounds like a Czech speaking Italian. He selected a motley collection of roots from the Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages of Europe. The effect is not unpleasing, but it is hardly systematic. What he didn't do was employ a clearly stated method to create a concise but effective core vocabulary, as Ogden (1937) and Hogben (1943) pointed out long ago. Most subsequent projects are open to the same criticism. When it comes to creating a vocabulary, constructed languages take one of two main approaches: Eclectic, where the designers pick from a variety of linguistic sources, sometimes with a small admixture of completely made-up items.